Sarah asked me the other day, after just over a year of travelling in our Land Rover, whether I had any regrets. My immediate answer, without giving it any thought, was that the idea of having missed everything we’ve experienced in the past year, if instead I’d chosen to stay longer at work, absolutely horrified me. We’ve seen and done so much that the thought of having missed out on it doesn’t bear thinking about.  You only live once, after all.  My answer prompted Sarah to suggest that I write a short blog on the subject.

If you’re approaching your mid to late 50’s you probably start contemplating what ‘life after work’ might look like.

I was definitely one of the lucky few in this world. I’ve had a fantastic career, worked with some of the brightest people imaginable, had a business partner that never once complained about my numerous shortcomings (we never had a partnership agreement and never had anything approaching a falling out).  Our practice was extremely profitable, intellectually both stimulating and rewarding, and when I left the practice the business was in as good a shape as it had ever been. So why leave? Well, the simple answer is that we figured we had enough to indulge our passion for exploring the world.

When contemplating leaving work, the first question you will inevitably ask yourself is “how much money do I need to be able to retire?” No matter where you do your research, all the answers are along the lines of ‘there isn’t a fixed number, and it depends on… blah blah blah’ - and then they list all the things which you already know.

In my mind, I reflected back to when I started work and what I then thought was a good salary (for the purposes of this article let’s say $100k). It would be unrealistic to envisage being able to save half of that, so if accumulated savings/net worth were to reach between $1m - $1.5m over a period of 20 or 30 years, even after taking inflation into account, that would be amazing. Yes, some people have more than that, but common sense says that it must be enough.

Having determined that one (probably) has enough money to retire, the next big question is ‘when should I take the plunge, and what will I do to occupy my time?’ - hopefully quite a lot of it.

Well, my philosophy (since the age of about 25) is that the only real treasures in a person’s life are their experiences. In my life, all my most treasured experiences so far are travel-related. Whether touring around Europe with my twin sister as a teenager, trekking in the Andes or the Himalayas with Sarah, cycling from Paris to Monte Carlo, bungee jumping off the bridge at Victoria Falls or anything in between. These are the things that have always brought me the most pleasure and satisfaction.

The fact that Sarah enjoys travel as much as I do, if not more, and on top of that has an incredible ability to organise unusual and exciting trips, meant that it was easy for the two of us to identify indefinite travel as the way to start off our post-retirement lives. 

After one year of travelling we haven’t even scratched the surface. Basically, we’ve done the outside of Australia (the Big Lap) and some parts of the UK (we didn’t get to Ireland this time). There is no realistic prospect of us ever having enough time to properly travel the whole world, or even a large part of it, certainly not at this rate. Accordingly our aim is to focus on enjoying and properly exploring the places that we do go to, happy that when we move on to the next adventure we haven’t left unfinished business behind.

We’re having a ball, not for one second regretting the choices we’ve made, and genuinely excited about what the future holds. I don’t think those sentiments would quite hold true about the last year if I’d stayed behind a desk, no matter how rewarding the work.